Iran's geography ensures that transport is a major problem for economic activity. Much of the country is sparsely settled; the major cities are hundreds of miles apart, with some roads running through inhospitable deserts. The population centers are separated from the oceans by high mountains. There are no rivers suitable for transportation over any distance. In short, transport is overwhelmingly by land through difficult terrain.

These natural barriers provide an explanation as to why Iran's economy consisted for many centuries of a series of local or regional markets, more than a national market. Producers and merchants did not consider their natural market to be Iran but rather their local region and, beyond that, the areas to which they could easily transport their goods, which could well mean nearby foreign regions rather than other parts of Iran.

This article looks at some major goals that have been set for sanctions and evaluates how effective sanctions have been at reaching those goals. It also examines the costs of sanctions, i.e., the impact on civilians and on international support for sanctions. Clawson concludes that sanctions are useful only as a short-term response in situations in which the world community is prepared to use force in the likely event that the target regime does not change its behavior. If there is not will to use force to back the sanctions, then the sanctions are morally dubious: they impose suffering and may cause deaths without offering a reasonable prospect of accomplishing good.

Safavid Iran's foreign trade is usually described as the highly profitable export of silk to Europe. That is at best an incomplete description. One problem is that it focuses on only one side of the trade (exports) rather than looking at both sides. Taken to its extreme, the usual story could make Iranians look like mad mercantilists determined to export without thinking much about what they got in return, while Europeans could look like crazed consumers so eager for Iranian silk that they would buy without thinking about the bill. At the very least, an account of trade should examine what is going in each direction, not just at what one side exports and the other side imports. That is one major lacuna of the usual story. Another is that it concentrates on Iranian–European trade without as much attention to Iranian trade with other areas. Safavid Iran's trade with Europe can be understood only in the context of its overall trade, for only in that context can we know whether Europe was an important market or an incidental one.

Few oil-producing economies, and for that matter few primary commodity-producing countries, have experienced as abrupt and severe a loss of foreign exchange earnings as that undergone by Iran in the period 1951–1953 following the nationalization of the oil industry and the subsequent international boycott of Iranian oil. While the literature on Iran during this period is extensive, it has focused largely on the political implications of nationalization and not so much on the economy's adjustment to the loss of foreign exchange. This article argues that the Iranian experience provides an instructive case study–admittedly an extreme one—of the ability of countries exposed to external shocks to adjust to the new realities.